Seven Pirates H review

Seven Pirates H

This is the fourth game in the Genkai Tokki series. You may not be familiar, partly because those were never released under that name in America, though they did see a release. Monster Monpiece is one of them (and a bit of a meh game), but Moero Chronicles and Moero Crystal H are both pretty fun first-person grid-based dungeon-crawling RPGs. What they all have in common is… there’s lots of lewdness going on, from sexy character designs to monster designs based on sex toys or breasts… Yeah, they’re all a bit weird.

And, speaking of being weird, this one is probably weirder than the others. I figured that was why it never saw a US release back when it came out on the Vita, and that it would die as a Japan-exclusive. This game is gonna be a bit odd to review because it may sound like I’m making things up, but I swear I’m not. This is a real game that exists.

Well… let’s try to review this.


Developer: Compile Heart
Publisher: EastAsiaSoft
Release date: May 12th, 2022
Platforms: Switch, Vita (Switch version reviewed, as the Vita version is Japan-only)
Genre: Console-style RPG

Review

So… Well I’ll start with the story, nothing too weird here. You play mainly as Parute, a young pirate girl, who happens to be of a very rare race: HUMAN. As she’s talking to a friend, something falls from the sky and hits her, and somehow she wakes up in the Monsupi Sea. The “object” ends up being Otton, the perverted pink seal monster dude you might recognize from Moero Chronicles or Moero Crystal. They team up (after Otton teaches Parute about Booby Training… more on that later) and steal a ship from another pirate, and quest to find treasure, building up a strong pirate crew of powerful monster girls. There’s some story here beyond that, mostly to do with Otton’s old pirate crew, and the New Four Heavenly Kings who end up being little more than quirky side-characters. The writing is comedic, and centered around playing with the different tropes of the characters, which are decently characterized, but everyone, including the main characters, do end up being a bit one-note. There’s still some funny moments here and there, but the story is, overall a bit unremarkable. It’s not a very serious game, even when it does get serious.

The presentation is pretty nice. Very colorful and bright and fun to look at. There’s actually a few really nicely-animated attacks in here, and… well, you’re looking at “sexy” anime characters the whole time, if you like that, cool. One thing is that the enemies you fight are actually 3D versions of monsters from the Moero Chronicles games, which manage the transfer from 2D to 3D oddly well. They look just as weird as usual. It’s the usual assortment of Tenga toys, weirdly-phallic things, boob UFOs and condom golems… Yeah this game continues being weird. But there’s also so much weird that you kinda stop noticing that it’s weird, it desensitizes you. I will say the texture work certainly seems to be straight ported from the Vita version because some of this doesn’t look too good. Also fire effects and such in some attacks is extra-pixelated, it’s pretty bad to see these PS1-level effects.

Outside of dungeons, you’ll be sailing across the ocean. It’s fairly small, and starts out smaller since anywhere that’s covered with clouds is inaccessible. Based on hints you might get, it’s possible that things you can grab in the ocean (or enemies to fight) will appear. You can also land on beaches of islands to see if things will pop up there, and of course the dungeons (except one of them) are on some of the islands. You unlock more of the map by finding torn map items, either from sidequests or in chests, giving you access to more islands and water to explore. This does get a bit annoying as time goes on, as some of the hints are unclear and some things just seem to appear regardless of hints, so you’ll spend a bunch of time just moving the boat around trying to find stuff. That said, being in the boat is the only time you get access to the services of the booby kin. Booby kin are these small dudes with round heads that have nipples on top instead of hair… They build and drive boats plot-wise, but in gameplay, they give hints for hidden stuff, offer sidequests (mostly finding materials or killing enemies), allow crafting of panties and bras, and sell items. You can expand the service of booby kin by finding more of them (each type offers different kinds of rewards).

The dungeons are very simplistic. Some are single-screen semi-open areas, some are just basically straight lines, a few have a bit more to them but are still mostly straight lines. None of them are big or have much happening at all. Quickly enough you get the option to ride Otton, though that only happens on certain bodies of water, or to climb up cliffs. There’s chests in the dungeons which have specific items, and there’s shiny spots on the ground which have semi-random material pickups (either for sidequests or crafting). Enemy encounters aren’t random, so you do see them as you walk around. Running into them them from the back gives you a minor advantage of your characters getting their turns first, and getting ran into from the back does the same for enemies. Otherwise it’s all Agility-based.

Combat is fairly straightforward, it’s pretty normal for an RPG of this kind. It does list the turn order of all units in the battle, so you’ll know when your characters will act next, sort of (they could improve this a bit, as there’s some times where turn orders get delayed and there’s nothing to indicate that). When you choose a character’s action, the timeline will show where they’ll be place next which is nice. You have a few actions to choose from. Attack, defend, item, skills and run. All pretty straightforward, though skills are a bit different. Skills are much as you’d expect, either strong attacks, or attacks with additional effects. If you have a lot of Pirate-type booby kin on your ship, all your characters get access to support skills from them, allowing everyone to be able to heal and cure ailments (and a few other things). Skills require MP, which stands for “Mura-Mura Points”. Mura-Mura is a japanese term that translates in english to “Horny”. You start each dungeon with 50 Horny Points, and these points do transfer between battles as long as you stay in the dungeon. You gain MP from hitting enemies, using MP-recovery items and from getting hit. If you get to 100 points, you get Excited, which gives you a slight stat boost, and in some cases enable certain skills to be used that normal mode can’t. If you get to 200 MP, your character is now Aroused (including a “sexy” animation), enabling use of an Arousal attack which costs the entire 200MP but they deal a ton of damage. Being Aroused gives you a stat boost above the one of Excited mode, and makes you immune to debuffs and status ailments, but only for 5 turns. Horniness dries up after 5 turns, which removes the stat buff, drops MP to 0 and delays the character’s next turn a bunch.

One thing I didn’t talk about is the color system… basically all characters and enemies are either red, blue or green. Red units deal more damage to green, green more damage to blue, and blue more damage to red… It’s the standard mobile game thing. It’s hardly noticeable for most of the game, but I figure I should mention it. By the end of the game it does have a larger effect, but since you can’t predict what color a boss will be (and both you and bosses have the ability to change colors with skills), it doesn’t matter.

So now we gotta talk about leveling up. I tried avoiding going into the weirdness of the game so far (and failed, because of Horny points and the dudes with nipples on their heads and the monster designs), but this is where things may get a bit too weird for some. I happen to find this stuff funny, but your experience may vary. Basically, you power up your characters through Otton’s Booby Training (told you I’d get back to that). This means getting “extracts” (which you get from battle, getting enough gives the character a potion you can use on them). Extracts can be given to the girls which increases all their stats. Nice. But that’s not all. Extracts also give you 10 points that you can assign to their breasts… There are 6 attributes to assign the points to, and each attribute affects the character’s stat bonuses, with each attribute increasing a stat if the value is brought up, and increases another stat if the value is brought down. For example, Size (from A to J cup) increases the character’s attack stat the higher it is, but will increase Agility more if the size is smaller. Perkiness increases either attack or HP. Cleavage increases either Agility or Defense. Softness increases either Defense or HP. Firmness increases either Attack or Defense. Height increases either HP or Agility. There’s probably some balance to it, it’s pretty much your choice, and it’s not a bad system. How you assign those points is the weird part (as if this wasn’t weird enough already). You can use the touchscreen or the analog sticks to manipulate the breasts. Rubbing them in circle affects size, flicking affects firmness, and a few other actions for the other attributes. They could’ve just made a menu for this, but nah, weird touch screen minigame. Alright then. Let’s not talk about the eggs which have a chance of just covering the characters’ chests with white liquid (but has a chance of giving items instead of that)… Oh, and in addition to stats, this does change how the breasts look on the 3D models for the characters. I think all stats have some effect on the visuals. And I do have graphical complaints about this because GEEZE, some of them end up looking beyond ridiculous, especially when seen from certain angles. Not just because of the size, but the gravity-defying that happens, the weird shape, and the weirdly-stretching textures of their clothes. Some characters do end up better on that end, Waffle never looked too ridiculous regardless of her attribute levels, but Rindo and Parute definitely do (and Saqra always looks ridiculous regardless). Maybe there’s some ideal attribute levels that end up not looking as awful, but I’m not about to experiment with that too much, that’d be weird man. I just went with what gave stats I wanted.

The other way to power up is equipment. Each character has 2 equipment slots: Bra and Panties. Bras provide no statistical bonuses, but rather give a passive skill such as ailment resistance, higher chance of extra attacks and other such stuff, so you can choose what fits better with what you want the character to do. Panties do give stats though, but nothing else. Better numbers is better, there’s no set bonuses or anything. Some equipment is character-specific, some is for everyone. The ones for everyone, at least stat-wise, end up generally being the best choices. Unlike Booby Training, this doesn’t change the appearance of the characters. So this is just looking at numbers going up.

And that’s about everything there is to talk about here.

Overall

If you look beyond the boobs, powering up methodology and weird enemies, this isn’t actually a bad game as far as gameplay design. It just does what it does in really weird ways presentation-wise. This could’ve easily looked very different presentationally while changing none of the actual gameplay.

There’s certainly some improvements they could have done, such as some graphical improvements, more content overall (the dungeons are all pretty tiny and simple), less annoying side-content… but overall this works pretty well… If you’re okay with the presentation, you’ll likely have some fun with this. If you’re not okay with the presentation… don’t get the game, simple enough. It’s not very long (around 15 hours to do almost-everything, I’m actually missing one whole dungeon that seemingly isn’t needed to get the true ending), so it’s a nice little time-waster while waiting for more games to come out.

I don’t know if I recommend this game, but I had fun with it. The Moero games are a bit better gameplay-wise, but this is short enough to not overstay its welcome.

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